MoD ‘dishonest' to call 1994 Chinook crash an accident, say families
RAF Chinook ZD576 was carrying 25 British intelligence personnel from RAF Aldergrove in Northern Ireland to a conference at Fort George near Inverness when it crashed in foggy weather on June 2 1994 on the Mull of Kintyre, Scotland.
All 25 passengers – made up of personnel from MI5, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British Army – were killed, along with the helicopter's four crew members.
The families of those who died said earlier this month that they were beginning legal action against the Ministry of Defence (MoD) for not ordering a public inquiry.
They want a High Court judge to be able to review information which they say was not included in previous investigations, and which they believe will shed new light on the airworthiness of the helicopter.
The families, who have coalesced into the Chinook Justice Campaign, said failing to order a public inquiry is a breach of the UK Government's human rights obligations.
An MoD spokesperson said: 'The Mull of Kintyre crash was a tragic accident, and our thoughts and sympathies remain with the families, friends and colleagues of all those who died.
'We have received a pre-action protocol letter from the Chinook Justice Campaign and are considering our response. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to comment further.'
Solicitor Mark Stephens, who is representing the families, said: 'The statements issued by the Ministry of Defence in recent days are so blatantly at odds with the facts as we now know them that they have caused immense upset to the families and cast a further cruel and disgraceful shadow on this ongoing travesty of justice.
'We know that the RAF helicopter carrying the 29 service personnel who were killed, serving their country, had been grounded because of fatal flaws in the software on board.
'For the MoD to claim that this was a 'tragic accident' flies in the face of the facts and is blatantly and disgracefully at odds with the truth.
'It is nothing short of dishonest, deceitful and disingenuous and we demand a retraction.'
The families have also called for the release of documents that were sealed at the time of the crash for 100 years, something revealed in a BBC documentary last year.
The MoD has said that records held in the National Archives contain personal information and early release of those documents would breach their data protection rights.
Mr Stephens said: 'For the Government to believe that data protection laws were designed to protect someone who is living – and who may have made a dreadful decision that night – rather than the truth emerging over 29 service personnel who were killed in an unairworthy aircraft, is a total abomination.
'This decision must be overturned, these files must be seen by a judge, and we will fight this in court if necessary.'
Niven Phoenix, a commercial pilot whose father Ian was one of the senior RUC officers killed in the crash, said: 'This was about as far from a tragic accident as you could get. Locking the files away until we are all dead proves there is a cover-up about something.
'The MoD's statement that these files have been sealed to protect third party interests is yet another disingenuous, distasteful and outright dishonest assertion designed to hide the truth using data protection laws which only came into force in the UK long after the crash.
'The Government would prefer for all the children of the Chinook victims to die like their parents rather than provide access, answers and take accountability for past mistakes. This is not the duty of candour promised by Keir Starmer in his election manifesto.'
Following the crash, the Chinook's pilots, Flight Lieutenants Richard Cook and Jonathan Tapper, were accused of gross negligence, but this verdict was overturned by the UK Government 17 years later, following a campaign by the families.
A subsequent review by Lord Philip set out 'numerous concerns' raised by those who worked on the Chinooks, with the MoD's testing centre at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire declaring the Chinook Mk2 helicopters 'unairworthy' prior to the crash.
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What Keir Starmer can't say
RAF Northolt It's a dull grey day in the pebbledashed sprawl of north-west London when I first see Keir Starmer. We're at RAF Northolt just outside Ruislip, a military airport that seems to capture much about modern Britain. Set among the tired housing estates of the 1930s, the base can no longer sustain itself primarily as a military hub, but to pay its way has become an airport for the rich and powerful. On the RAF side of the base, the feel is that of worn-out Whitehall: old Chesterfield sofas and green carpets, portraits of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh yet to be replaced by the new King. A guestbook lying on a table inside tells a familiar story of old alliances: 'Nothing stronger than NZ-UK together!' writes the prime minister of New Zealand, Christopher Luxon, somewhat optimistically. A few hundred metres away, an RAF A400M aircraft awaits: our taxi for the day. The plane will take us to the Royal Navy airbase Culdrose, in Cornwall, from where we will transfer by military helicopter to the HMS Prince of Wales, an aircraft carrier lying 20 miles or so off the English coast. Keir Starmer on the HMS Prince of Wales. Photo by Richard Pohle/POOL/AFP via Getty Images As I take my seat, facing sideways into the plane's empty hull, Starmer walks up a ramp from the back alongside his Defence Secretary, John Healey. It's hard not to smile at the image: Top Gun meets Top Gear. Only for social democrats. Starmer looks much as he does on television: short and stocky, with greying, neatly combed hair. Yet he also appears younger than his age. His face is boyish and clean cut, marked only by the mildest signs of the decades gone: a few lines of purple on his cheek, greyish bags just under the eyes, the crowded lower teeth of a man his age. It is easy to forget but Starmer is 62, an old prime minister: older at the start of his premiership than Anthony Eden or Harold Wilson were at the end of theirs when the toll on their bodies became too much. He is older than John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at the end of their time in power, too – and only three years younger than Margaret Thatcher when she was finally defenestrated in 1990. Starmer, though, is still full of energy; not wrung out – not yet at least. He will only be a year into the job in July. 'This is going to be good,' he declares, enthusiastically, as he bounds up to me, excited about the 24 hours ahead. We are due to stay overnight on the aircraft carrier. The take-off is 'spicy' as promised – steep and fast. But once we are in the air, I get called up to the cockpit where Starmer is sitting behind two pilots guiding us down over the West Country. He is proud and serious-looking and I am struck by the sense of him as a schoolboy, happy in his special seat and the responsibility he has been given. As we begin to chat, the folds of old England stretch out below us: the ridges and fields, hedges and pathways. I wonder how it must feel for someone like Starmer, this boy of the Home Counties, to look out at the country he governs like this. Starmer explains to his aides how he and I used to sit in Portcullis House drinking coffee and talking about Europe when he was Jeremy Corbyn's shadow Brexit secretary. It is true. 'Those were the days,' he jokes, as if searching for small talk. I briefly wonder if he means it: a time of simpler battles, perhaps. But surely not. Now he's the boss. He gets to decide. On that point, I ask why he thinks it's important to spend a night aboard an aircraft carrier. Other prime ministers I've known have been desperate to get back to Downing Street, from where they can control events. He tells me he likes to visit people in their place of work. It treats them with respect, he says, and they open up more about the realities of their lives. He tells the story of a submariner who discovered at the end of his tour of duty that both of his parents had died while he was away. The story seems to have lodged in Starmer's mind; to have haunted him. Over the next few weeks – during which I will see Starmer on four occasions – I hear it repeatedly. Starmer often raises it with aides, I'm told. Every prime minister approaches the job in their own way, shaped by their own particular foibles. Many of the most able and hard-working in recent years have become overwhelmed by the enormity of the task in front of them, morphing into caricatures of their own worst selves in the process. Theresa May and Rishi Sunak suffered this fate. Others were preternaturally unsuited to the responsibilities of high office: Liz Truss. Starmer does not sit in either of these camps. Not yet at least. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe He looks comfortable with power, easy with its responsibilities. Those closest to him say he sleeps well. Football and family help. Old friends visit him in his flat in Downing Street to watch his team, Arsenal. A rowing machine keeps him active. Evening television with his wife and children provides comic relief: Friday Night Dinner has Starmer and his children roaring with laughter; the scenes of middle-class Jewish life, all too familiar for his wife and children, who are being raised in the traditions of his wife's family faith. Of the prime ministers I have seen up close, Tony Blair, David Cameron and Boris Johnson all looked similarly comfortable with the pressure. Yet Starmer is qualitatively different from each of them. He does not carry the missionary conviction of Blair or the patrician authority of Cameron. The mocking nihilism of Johnson is about as far from Starmerite earnestness as is possible to imagine. Starmer is something else: a manager. Where Blair, Cameron and Johnson looked up and out towards history and the role they believed they were destined to play, Starmer's gaze travels down: to the land below; into the family bonds and households of the people he governs, their small prides and dignities, hopes and fears. Starmer is drawn to the particular over the general, the practical over the idealistic. He is the director-general of the United Kingdom, permanent secretary of the British state, manager of the decaying post-Blairite order. The question that begins to worm into my thoughts as I watch him is whether he will be its last. HMS Prince of Wales When we arrive at Culdrose, we are handed special rubber jumpsuits that we both have to wear to protect us in case our helicopters crash into the sea. We have a 45-minute flight ahead of us en route to one of the two aircraft carriers Starmer has inherited from Cameron's defence review in 2010: hulking gifts from that world before the drone swarms and AI revolution upending modern warfare in Ukraine. After landing we meet in a suite of wood-panelled rooms set aside for the top brass to work, sleep and entertain. We are back at the stern of the ship, where you can hear and even feel its giant propellers working underneath. We are shown into the dining room, where the table has been laid for dinner: all silver finery and crystal glassware. The table is specially designed to accommodate the entire cabinet in case of emergency: a floating extension of the British state. Yet, it is not funded by the British state. Some of these rooms, I'm told, have been furnished by the billionaire part-owner of Manchester United, Jim Ratcliffe. It is hard to avoid the symbolism: a country still projecting global power, but forced to scrabble around for private donations to do so. After dinner, Starmer arrives in the officers' mess, where his presence is greeted with a gentle murmur of interest. An aide hands him a lager and he begins chatting to the young officers around him. Starmer is earnest and good-natured, if a little out of place – like a dad at his son's birthday, trying his best to talk with the boys. He has a habit of fidgeting while he talks, pushing his hair back; reaching inside his shirt; searching for his beer but hardly touching it. He is not uncomfortable, but nor is he commanding. There's a certain giddiness in the air, like a stag do at the airport. We're in a room full of excited sailors about to set off on a great adventure. Starmer, though, brings a sombre energy, keen to join in but drawn to the serious. When one officer speaks of his excitement at the tour ahead, he cannot help himself: 'You must have mixed emotions though,' he replies. 'Your families have to serve too, don't they?' Yes sir, the officer responds, giddiness gone. The crew want to talk about their world tour; Starmer about sacrifice and duty. 'Very nice to see you,' Starmer eventually offers, aware he needs to move to the next group, signalling his departure with a double thumbs up and a smile: a moment of deep English awkwardness. In the background I notice John Healey, at ease, laughing loudly with a beer. The next morning, the scene repeats itself. Over breakfast with the rank-and-file sailors – rather than the officers – Starmer sits over a plate of plain, untouched baked beans and nothing else – the breakfast of a pescatarian in the Navy. In a speech to the crew on deck a little later he returns to his theme. 'I want to extend that thank you to all your families.' The officers and sailors stand respectfully in silence, neither disdainful of the sentiment nor particularly moved. Later, I sit down with Starmer to ask about the visit and to tell him what I want from my time with him over the coming weeks: 'A profile,' I say, 'not just of you, but of what you're trying to do.' I want to understand 'the story of the government'. This is my task, to discover the source of Starmerism; to understand what he is trying to achieve and why. During the next six weeks, I speak at length with Starmer and those closest to him to understand the central purpose of the government as it approaches its one-year anniversary. These conversations take place over multiple bottles of wine at dinner, in snatched conversations on planes and in taxis, on the phone or by staccato WhatsApp messages. For many of Starmer's predecessors as prime minister, the purpose of their government was much easier to identify. Margaret Thatcher's: to unpick the postwar consensus; Tony Blair's to 'save' public services as he saw it; David Cameron's to eliminate the deficit. Across Westminster a collective wisdom has set in like frost that Starmer's government lacks definition, which is why it cannot tell a coherent 'story' about what it is for. It is not for balancing the books or ending austerity, levelling up or taking back control. The challenge Starmer faces is that without such a clear mission he and his government appear devoid of purpose, lacking in direction, left only to tinker. Even Starmer's aides accept there is some truth in this analysis. Many of the issues that have derailed the government in its opening months in power could have been dealt with if the public was clearer about why each decision fitted into an overarching direction of travel. The controversy over asylum hotels, according to Starmer's aides, has become a story about Labour's failures because it didn't explain that they are a consequence of Boris Johnson's pursuit of the unworkable Rwanda scheme instead of the practical methods necessary to deal with the backlog of claims. The biggest failure of all – according to the most influential aides in No 10 – has come over the winter fuel benefit, because its cut became a proxy for deeper questions of purpose. 'Rachel [Reeves] goes in and the Treasury tells her the taps have been turned on and you need to get a grip,' says one adviser. 'Rachel gets a grip, but voters conclude we're not on their side.' Having failed to tell a story, in other words, voters do not know what the adviser calls 'the most fundamental question in politics': whose side are you on? Part of Starmer's problem is his own political shapeshifting: once a pro-immigration, soft-left, Corbyn-light left-winger; now a tough-talking, 'hard Labour' immigration sceptic overseeing cuts to welfare, international aid and government spending to balance the books; a man once seen by the Tory press as a dangerous radical who is now labelled 'Keir Powell' for his stark warnings about the damage caused by the Conservative Party's 'one-nation experiment in open borders'. Aboard the HMS Prince of Wales, Starmer attempts an explanation for the misstep over winter fuel which had opened up the charge that he didn't know whose side he was on. The opening moves of his government stemmed from a determination to clear the decks of the mess left by the Conservatives, he says. Beyond that, he insists his purpose has always been clear: the five 'missions', ranging from securing the highest sustained economic growth in the G7 to turning the country into a clean-energy superpower. Since being elected, however, these missions have been overtaken by six 'milestones' which are meant to show the public the country is on the right track. The aim seems simple. To make sure that people feel the 'change' in their everyday lives that Labour campaigned on last year. Yet, what is it that connects these missions and milestones – what is the ideology that lies behind them? How do they form a coherent analysis of what has gone wrong in Britain and, therefore, what the government needs to do to fix it? Over the next few weeks I will come back to these questions again and again, and wonder whether the nation will ever hear a convincing answer to them. Westminster In so many ways, Starmer is a remarkably unremarkable Prime Minister. He doesn't shout or swear. He has 'codes of behaviour', apologising if he rings on a Sunday or early in the morning. He breaks from work for a few hours in the evening to see his children and still tries to keep Friday evenings free for family. He does not invite work colleagues into the flat above No 11. He makes sure to be at home when his son comes back from kickboxing. Politics is not a consuming passion. He has no political hero. It is clear he still finds Westminster mildly distasteful. He doesn't stop on the stairs of No 10 to look at any of his predecessors pictured descending from the first-floor landing. 'With Gordon Brown the thing he cares about is politics above all else,' one aide explains, suggesting that politics is not the key to unlocking Starmer. 'Gordon will ask about your family, but his brain wants to get on to politics. Keir is the opposite. If you're stuck in a lift with him, you're talking about your family.' All this arms Starmer with a certain detachment. He is not part of a clique in the Labour Party. There is even a detachment from the building of No 10 itself, which bears few marks of his presence. His office has hardly any personal mementos – far fewer than it had under David Cameron or Boris Johnson. A sole photograph of his wife and children sits behind his desk, and a miniature World Cup trophy given to him by the former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger. He prefers to work in 'the study' on the first floor, a bright but formal room off the state rooms where he can see his family flat above No 11. But here too, in the study, there aren't many signs of Starmer the man: no pieces of art chosen by him or even a desk. Instead, he prefers to sit on the sofa. A few old busts look down on him, unmoved from before. You get the sense Starmer has never looked at them or asked who they are. Many may read this and conclude that Starmer is reassuringly normal. In his dealings with cabinet ministers and aides he does not judge them politically, but on whether he deems them sensible. Aides say he has a tendency to empower people and to defend them. He dislikes hostile briefings about colleagues. When the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, was recently the subject of a news story claiming that her position was under threat, Starmer got in touch with her directly to say it wasn't true. Of course, Starmer can be decisive: Sue Gray was sacked. Jeremy Corbyn was kicked out of the Labour Party. Often, when the chaos becomes too much, Starmer will tell his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, simply to 'get a grip' – the authorisation necessary to impose order. According to those who work with Starmer in No 10, he has, in fact, become more decisive as he becomes frustrated with the slow pace of change. Starmer does not think the country requires a Thatcher-style upheaval. Photo by Hilaria McCarthy/Daily Express/'Since New Year, he has found his voice in government more than any other time I've known him,' says one. In the 8.30 morning meeting which sets the tone for the day, Starmer now demands evidence of action before lunchtime rather than the following day. On the most important decisions, it has been Starmer who has pushed to be more decisive: to abolish NHS England; to move more quickly to increase defence spending; to take control of British Steel. The image of Starmer as a dry, mechanical technocrat is not quite true either. On steel in particular, one aide said, 'the spreadsheet said no; the heart said yes'. Yet his lack of ideology means you hear much clearer explanations about the depth of Britain's malaise from his aides than you do from him. Starmer has been warned by some that too much of the conversation in government feels like it belongs to 'a previous world', before Donald Trump and Ukraine, Gaza and the technological revolution. Where Starmer sees a failure of leadership, his closest aides see a more troubling systemic breakdown. According to those nearest to him, the last 30 years have been marked by the failure of successive governments to develop any real political economy. The result is a country that feels lost and vulnerable, shorn of any collective will or national mission. Starmer has been warned that this failure had led to an even deeper crisis – a crisis of national purpose. 'What is the way of life we are defending?' one aide asked him in a note. 'A country can only come together as a social democracy or come together to defend itself if it believes it is worth defending.' It is in such interactions that an incoherence at the heart of this government can be glimpsed: between those who see deep structural challenges and looming political dangers, and those who believe such talk alarmist and overblown. The alarmists are in the minority, but Starmer listens to them. 'The great challenge we face is hopelessness,' one senior adviser tells me. 'A lot of young people have completely checked out and that is fatal.' This hopelessness manifests itself in the rising numbers of children not turning up for school, teenagers becoming radicalised or young adults signing off work with illness. Starmer's aides are spooked by the number of teenagers MI5 feels it must watch. The two biggest threats the security services are dealing with now come from Islamist extremists and young men on the far right. 'Until young people believe they have a part to play in the country, [it] will decline,' one explains. 'One thousand people a day are signing up to [the welfare benefit] PIP… while the most able are escaping to Dubai. The central truth is this: there is no economic growth or national security without hope.' National hopelessness has set in after two decades of failure in which living standards have fallen, public services have deteriorated and the public realm degraded. The poorest households in the UK are now worse off than the poorest households in Slovenia. Many see a future in which their children cannot afford to buy the same kind of house as they had or go to university. They begin to worry they will not be able to enjoy a decent retirement or to pass anything on to their children. As the spirit saps, so do the horizons of the country and the trust in the institutions of state to turn things around. The result is a political malaise in which voters begin to turn to more radical solutions. 'If you don't give people hope, you will get the alternative,' Starmer's aide warns me: 'The destruction of failing institutions.' What is so striking when listening to Starmer's advisers talk like this is that on one level the Prime Minister appears intellectually to understand the challenge, even sometimes to agree with the analysis. And yet on another he does not seem able – or willing – to channel such thoughts in a way that the country understands. Over dinner with one of Starmer's advisers one night I asked how I could break through Starmer's outer caution, to get him to open up about his real feelings on questions like this. 'Tell him about your family,' came the answer, 'and ask him about his.' Oslo The next time I see the Prime Minister is on the runway at Stansted as we prepare to fly to Oslo. We're on board the official government plane, an ordinary Airbus affair with a VIP makeover: 'United Kingdom' sprayed in gold on the outside, business-class seating stretching back through most of the plane on the inside. There was no Top Gun-style entrance this time. Instead, the Prime Minister appears in a suit and tie, carrying his own suitcase, before walking down the aisle to greet me. He apologises for the early start – we arrived at Stansted at 5.40am. I joke that I'd almost certainly got more sleep than he had and say he must be exhausted. Starmer had been up late the night before at a special VE anniversary concert on Horse Guards Parade with the King. I notice that he brushes off the suggestion of tiredness. There's something of the 'mustn't grumble' about him; a figure from an older generation. Starmer was born in 1962 but his formative years were the 1970s – that defining decade of turmoil which still hangs over British life. To the modern conservative right, it is the decade of disgrace and decline: the years when Britain's postwar experiment in social democracy finally collapsed. For the left, the 1970s are equally traumatic, the decade Labour opened the door to the great tragedy: Thatcherism. For Starmer the trauma of the 1970s was more personal. Much of the kitchen-sink story is well known: the distant, grouchy father; the loving, ill mother. Overshadowed by his successful career at the bar, his family home in north London and his knighthood, some of the commentary about Starmer's early life has become eye-rollingly dismissive, particularly of his claims of hardship. Such cynicism misses the point. Starmer grew up in a household gripped by his mother's life-changing illness, Still's disease. From this came a father so devoted to his fragile, disabled wife he steadily withdrew from life and love, and a mother so stoically devoted to her children that she became the icon of Starmer's life. Starmer was the second of four children. Two years after he arrived, his mother gave birth to twins: Nick and Katy. After complications at birth, it became clear Nick would find life harder than most. Like his mother, though for different reasons, Nick was vulnerable; life forever altered by circumstances beyond his control. Keir and his brother shared a bedroom as children. Keir was the best man at Nick's wedding. Keir continued to look out for him as their lives followed radically different paths: Keir's to grammar school, university, Oxford and the law; Nick's to a life of insecurity, hardship and eventually illness. Nick died of cancer on Boxing Day last year. I wanted to ask Starmer about his brother, but needed to find the right time. Before I had the chance to talk to him in private, I would have to follow him around Oslo, touring HMS St Albans, a Type 23 frigate docked in the Norwegian capital for the meeting of the 10,000-strong, British-led 'joint expeditionary force' – the name alone something of an unsettling echo of previous European conflagrations. This year the frigate has twice been deployed to track Russian warships in the seas around Britain. The expeditionary force meeting between the leaders of the ten northern European nations involved was taking place in Oslo's City Hall, site of the Nobel Prize ceremonies. As I watch Starmer arrive I bump into his urbane national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's former chief of staff. He jokes that he'd told the Prime Minister to message Donald Trump to say where he is. I've known Powell for years and ask whether he's heard much from Blair recently. Yes, he missed a call from him in New York where he was with Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy to the Middle East. Blair's influence remains a startling, under-explored reality of modern Britain – a ghost prime minister still pulling strings, but for private and somewhat obscured interests. Starmer still talks 'at length' with his predecessor. When the day draws to a close I'm bundled into a minivan for Downing Street staff that will take me back to the airport, where I will get the chance to interview Starmer again. We meet in a small VIP suite tucked away in a deserted departure lounge where he has changed into more comfortable clothes – casual black trousers, black T-shirt and a black zip-up jumper – ahead of the next leg of his visit: a flight to Poland where he will catch an overnight train to Kyiv alongside Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Donald Tusk: the relentless life of a prime minister when Europe is at war. 'It's really good of you to come and just get a sense of what we're doing,' opens Starmer as I'm shown into the impersonal, thoroughly Scandinavian room. We are joined by just one aide. Starmer is conscious that time is tight. 'I think one evening in London we should just have a bit more time where it's not quite so, you know, you've got ten minutes here or 15 minutes there.' He suggests a drink in No 10. I begin. 'What I noticed here, and watching you on the Prince of Wales, is that when you talk to the sailors you always come back – you are pulled back – to asking them about their families.' 'Yeah, it really is very significant,' Starmer says before returning to the submariner who had lost his parents. He says the same is true of the families of the Jaguar Land Rover workers who were awaiting the terms of his trade negotiations with Trump. 'Nobody had spoken about what the consequences might have been if we hadn't got the deal, but these workers know what's what.' It would be easy to be cynical about this. Isn't this just what prime ministers say to justify their decisions? Perhaps, though it never seemed that way to me. More interesting is that he cannot see himself reflected in his own words. 'You must feel it yourself,' I suggest. 'You talked about keeping sacrosanct your Friday nights, but you are away tonight – overnight – you're away from your own family. So is it a kind of reflection?' Starmer seems slightly taken aback, though not offended. 'I have never thought of it that way,' he replies. He takes pride in his role as a loving, modern family man. 'I do not want to be a dad – and it usually is dad – who, in a few years, says, 'I wish I'd spent more time with my children.'' I sympathise but can't help thinking: yes, but you are Prime Minister. His hours are not normal. Every day he wakes at around 6am to begin work. From then until around 8.30am he works on his official papers before joining the first meeting of the day in No 10. Occasionally he has a pre-meeting before this. From here he works until around 7pm, before his break for dinner with his family. At 10pm, though, he is back watching the news before turning to his papers at around 10.30pm, after which he goes to bed sometime before midnight. On top of this, he is regularly away for international summits – like Oslo – or taking calls from world leaders at any hour of the day. And that is before the moments of crisis which dominate a prime minister's life. This is what Starmer has chosen – the culmination of a long career of steadily building responsibility. Before entering No 10 he was a shadow minister and MP. And before that director of public prosecutions (DPP). Most other DPPs return to private practice, become judges or make their fortune in the City. Starmer alone used the role as a stepping stone to political power. Throughout his life he has sought out positions of responsibility with intense workloads. Why does he do this? Even as a child, he was looking after his brother and worrying about his mum. 'Oh,' he replies, 'I don't know. Um, I think it probably has just been there all my life. I had to take responsibility for the things when my mum was very ill, et cetera, et cetera. And therefore I've always sort of done leadership roles.' As he reflects on this, he notes that in his leisure time he usually becomes the organiser, the fixer. 'I'm in a football team on a Sunday, but of course I had to take over running it,' he says. 'It's just a lifelong habit to take on responsibility.' He seems drawn to it. 'I think that must probably be right. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it, to be perfectly honest.' But to study Starmer's career is to notice that he's not only drawn to responsibility, but also to those who, in different ways, are traumatised. He mentions John and Penny Clough, whose daughter was murdered by her ex-partner in 2010 while he was out on bail. Starmer got to know them when he was DPP. John and Penny are Starmer's people. Wounded by a tragedy at the core of the family. Their pain was private, intimate, personal, unrecognised by the system. Starmer couldn't fix their pain but he could try to fix the system that denied them dignity. John and Penny were in the audience at Starmer's first Labour Party conference speech as Prime Minister, alongside Doreen Lawrence, whose son, Stephen, was murdered by racists in 1993. As DPP, Starmer brought his killers to justice. This was the same speech in which Starmer made a rare reference to his brother, Nick. 'Every time I achieved something in my life, my dad used to say: 'Your brother has achieved just as much as you, Keir,'' Starmer told the audience that day. 'And he was right. I still believe that.' What Starmer didn't say in his speech was that his brother was dying. Aware that I am approaching difficult terrain, I say that he hasn't spoken much about his brother since his passing. Starmer shifts in his chair, eyes on me, emotion beginning to swell. 'Well it was, bits of it were hard,' he says, slowly, looking at me directly, his grey-blue eyes welling with tears behind his dark-rimmed glasses. 'He was dying of cancer,' he explains, his stare glazed, as if he is looking through me. 'He was a vulnerable man. He had difficulties learning… He found it hard to hold down a long-term job. He didn't have much money and couldn't have coped with media.' Starmer's eyes are now full. 'When I knew he had cancer and he was dying, I had to make sure he was protected.' He recounts the lengths he went to, visiting the hospital in Leeds where Nick was in intensive care, smuggling himself into his ward by using the porters' lift so he would not be spotted. 'These are the moments in politics that are the hardest,' Starmer goes on, still holding my gaze, now rigid in his seat. 'You're obviously in the public arena all the time and you're expected to be, and I'm not complaining about that. But when there's something deeply personal going on in your own life, it is really sometimes hard.' Starmer lost his mother in 2015, his father in 2018 and then his brother over Christmas last year. Starmer struggles to talk about his brother. 'You want to say to the world, just please stay there,' he starts to explain, searching for a way to articulate his emotions. 'But also I didn't want to… I didn't want to use… I can't really explain this.' He leans forward, still staring into my eyes, intense and lost, no longer a Prime Minister but a normal man bereaved, the tears back in his eyes. 'I didn't want him to think I was using him as a prop for my politics by talking about it,' he explains, 'because I respected him as an individual. I worried about this for Mum and Dad as well, I worried that if I used his story or their story, that somehow that was very disrespectful, I never spoke about my dad till he passed.' For a second I'm unsure how to respond. What do you say to a man who is also Prime Minister in such a moment? Are you OK, perhaps? I had not expected such raw emotion. I say the responsibility he has always felt for his brother must have shaped his attitude towards life and work, that he never had a choice but to look after him. 'No, I didn't, I didn't, I don't think I did. And I had to take care of him as best I could till the end.' I wonder whether Nick's death has brought him closer to his sisters. 'Yes, and, um, these things are… they're quite profound,' he replies, again grasping for the words, eyes full of emotion, voice choked. 'Everybody anticipates their parents will die before them… it still hits you like a bus… but when your brother dies, [it's] a whole new thing.' The same vacant, teary stare returns, memories flooding back. Has it changed him? A long pause. 'I don't know,' he replies. The manager is coming back. 'I carry bits of this stuff inside me. I don't spend a lot of time thinking it through, which is probably a bad thing.' You're a man, I joke. Yeah, he says. And with that our time is up. Let's continue this over a pint, he says, reaching for the Englishman's prop when emotions threaten to make a conversation too real. Downing Street In one sense, Starmer has come to power at just the right moment. The country that he governs is one that feels traumatised by events: uneasy, fearful, hopeless, broken. Britain is coming to terms with almost two decades of stagnation, failure and political upheaval culminating in last summer's sudden explosion of violent disorder, a Balkanised country of disconnected haves and have-nots living in uneasy cohabitation. Yet, Starmer finds it difficult to articulate this feeling, to capture the mood of the nation in its raw reality, much as he finds it hard to explain his emotions. He could do it with John and Penny, with Doreen, when the scale was human, almost domestic. But now his stage is national. The words he has to find inside himself must reach millions, must drag them along with him. He must understand the national trauma and its causes, to connect with emotion and anger. Yet he seems reluctant to poke at the reasons the country is so tense and angry and poor, to analyse the cause of the country's malaise, much as he seems uninterested by his own motivations in life. Starmer prefers to get on with things, to take on responsibility, to manage. He mustn't grumble. However – as some of his aides understand – the national trauma is there, lying barely below the surface, ready to burst out. It is not hard to see why. From 2008, the country has stumbled from one crisis to the next: financial, political, medical, social – and now in Gaza, an international crisis not only for those living through it, but also for British politics, to a depth that Starmer and his government do not yet seem to appreciate. When I ask Starmer whether he worried about being the Prime Minister while a potential genocide was being carried out by an ally that Britain has a close security relationship with, he evades. I ask him if he thought the war in Gaza had become a genocide. Again, he evades. A little under a fortnight after our meeting in Norway, I arrive in Downing Street for the pint Starmer had offered. It's just after 6pm on a Wednesday, the point of the week after Prime Minister's Questions when he can relax, if only for a moment. I am taken up to 'the study', the room on the first floor where Starmer likes to work. When I am shown in, Starmer is waiting for me, tie off, having been reminded – I suspect – that we are due to have a 'relaxed' interview over a beer. I have worn a tie and he immediately apologises that he and an aide are not wearing theirs. He then remembers he'd promised beer. 'Do you want one?' 'Er, if you're having one, thank you,' I offer. At that point, Starmer himself walks off to track down beer which I suspect neither of us really wants. A few minutes later he comes in with a silver tray, carrying three cans of Camden Hells and three glasses for himself, the press aide in attendance and myself. The manager, for a moment, transformed into a fastidious servant. Keir Starmer with his parents on graduation day at Leeds University. Photo by Labour Party Handout After some back and forth about the events of the week, I try to move the subject back to the ground we covered in Oslo. 'Don't get me on my family again,' he says with a smile, gentle and self-conscious; a half-joke. Instead I ask him about his ideology. Among some in Westminster there is a perception that he is a human rights lawyer first and a politician second. I'm not sure this is quite right. He was a human rights lawyer, but then became a prosecutor. Isn't the truth that he is anti-ideological in almost every sense – a pragmatist to his bones? But are there any ideals that he thinks are sacrosanct? 'Human dignity,' he replies immediately and with force, almost interrupting me before I can finish. 'The dignity of the individual. And the respect that goes with it.' This is the Starmerite code, I realise. The stories that touch him the most are those when he believes people's dignity have been undermined in some way. He doesn't only get animated by these stories – he seeks them out. I raise the issue of the submariner. 'To understand the human impact that things have is for me hugely important and hugely impactful.' Earlier that day he had met the mother of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel who was shot and killed in her home in Liverpool in August 2022. As Starmer begins to describe what happened to Olivia, the mist returns, the voice faltering again. I try to push him on this constant pull towards trauma and the belief that he can ease it, somehow, by fixing things, as though he thinks if he works harder, takes on more responsibility, he can banish people's pain. 'I think the 'fix it' bit is right,' he replies firmly. 'The thing that frustrates me most in politics is people talking about a problem without getting on and fixing it,' he says, speeding up as he wades into sincerely held beliefs. 'My instinct is to fix,' he goes on. 'What is the problem? What's at the heart of it? What can we do?… Rather than the sort of rhetorical flourishes and all the rest of it.' The problem is that fixing problems one at a time is not enough as Prime Minister. The job is to fix the country as a whole by explaining why so many things need fixing in the first place: to identify the cause of the problem and to convince the public that you have the right answers. This is the side of the job that he struggles with. 'Yes, I suppose I would accept that criticism,' he replies. 'I probably live in a world where I want that to speak for itself, but I recognise, you know that it doesn't… I've always sort of operated in a world where it's probably better for other people to say you're doing a good job than say it yourself.' For Starmer this is just another side of politics he finds hard. While there is a certain modesty here, there's also a degree of arrogance. Starmer has succeeded in everything in his life: from school to law and now politics. For the first time in his career he is not being held up as one of the gifted stars, but – potentially – a failure unable to rise to the occasion. He is used to praise and reward for the results of his graft. He is now in a different world, which is more punishing. 'There are many bits of politics that are just alien to the way I do my work. And constantly trumpeting what you're doing is… I find it hard, you know.' Wasn't he, in one obvious way, similar to both his mother and his father in this regard – preferring just to put his head down and get on with things? 'Absolutely.' I notice he has hardly touched his beer. He says he has come to a better understanding of his dad as he has gotten older. I mention his emotion – never far from the surface. 'Yeah, I'm not sure I can explain that, but I mean… the emotion is there, the passion, if you like, is there. And I find that easier to express in a one-to-one with people, with some of these people I've been dealing with.' Privately, he says, the conversations he has are wrought with 'huge emotion'. I probe a little further on his difficulty articulating himself. I mention my feeling that he is not only dealing with traumatised individuals, but a traumatised country which is looking for someone to make sense of it. 'I certainly think since the '08 crash there's been – I wouldn't say a sense of trauma – but a sense of disaffection.' From here, Starmer moves on to safer turf: what Labour got wrong during this time. The party stopped listening, 'particularly on things like immigration'. But what was the central thing that went wrong in the country – and therefore the central mission of his government to put right? Of all my questions, this is the one he struggles with the most. The words come, but the answer is long-winded, circuitous, disjointed. He suggests a number of factors, before adding that 'it's built on what I just said about Labour, because we got it wrong in that period as well'. But what was the central Tory mistake? 'It's a big question,' Starmer says, searching for the answer which he should not only know, but feel. 'Firstly, they went for austerity in a harsh and brutal way,' he offers. 'Instead of thinking strategically, they just did a sort of blunt reduction across the board.' Hence the crisis in public services. But then the party turned in on itself leading to Brexit and the disease of chronic short-termism, which he describes as 'the core issue for me'. But surely this account is insufficient, failing to explain – at the most fundamental level – why Britain has stagnated for so long. 'What has gone wrong that has left us as a poor country?' I ask again. 'We haven't had enough investment into the country,' he replies. 'We've got poor public services. We don't have skills and training programmes in the right place. And, in particular, in the last few years, and this is what we're turning around, we have looked… like an unstable country.' Once again, the answers Starmer turns to are, in effect, apolitical. Investors tell him 'we need to see a more stable environment', he explains. 'Which is why we're so focused on stability, fiscal rules and making sure that even if they're difficult decisions, that is the foundational stone of what we're doing.' Stability, not change: the core of the Starmer government. 'You don't think that the country is fundamentally broken,' I put it to him, stating his position. '[You think] it can be fixed… with intelligent and stable leadership… [that] it doesn't need to fundamentally change in a kind of Thatcherite way.' 'No,' Starmer replies. This is the Starmerite bet: the first principle of his political analysis. Britain's national model is not broken. It is fixable. 'I love this country,' he explains. 'It's not just that we're a reasonable, tolerant, decent group of individuals, and I genuinely believe that we are, it is also that there is this sort of sheer brilliance of what we have achieved and what we're capable of achieving.' Starmer is far from the first prime minister to talk in such a way. John Major evoked visions of England's 'long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs'. Ted Heath believed in an England of fairness. 'If we tackle our problems with resolution, courage and moderation, and we tackle our problems together, we have a bright future to look forward to,' he declared ahead of the February 1974 general election. It's difficult not to hear Starmer in these words. Yet there is – and has always been – a darker, subterranean England that does not fit into this vision of gentle calm; the England of Enoch Powell, one of mythic foreboding and upheaval, violent disorder and civil unrest. After losing power, Heath spent the rest of his life becoming ever more bewildered by the direction of the country and his party. Harold Wilson retired a broken man two years later and James Callaghan was eventually felled by an explosion of industrial action he could not control. Today, Starmer governs a country more uneasy than at any time since the removal of Thatcher, a country that only last year saw gangs of vigilantes trying to burn refugees alive. Starmer's Britain includes Oxted, Leeds, Oxford and Islington – the places that made him – but also Southport and Rotherham, Tamworth and Stoke, where gangs of white and Asian men fought pitched battles against each other. Britain today is a country on edge, where Tommy Robinson is a cult hero to some, where Nigel Farage has a realistic chance of becoming prime minister and Robert Jenrick has become the Conservative Party's leader-in-waiting, wielding a refashioned brand of nationalism for the TikTok age. Before I can push Starmer any further on whether his version of England still exists, I'm told to wrap up. Starmer, though, finally seems relaxed. He motions to his flat outside. The kids have settled in, he says, partly because he is so strict at keeping work away. There is no entertaining – apart from his old friend Colin who comes around for the football. Starmer then walks me downstairs, past the photographs of his predecessors. Truss has made it on to the wall, but not yet Sunak, he points out. By the look of it, however, there is only one more space before there are none left to hang new prime ministerial portraits. 'Presumably I'm in the downstairs bog,' he says with a laugh. Glasgow Starmer's political future rests on whether he is able to sell his brand of gradualism. The challenge is formidable. Labour currently sits on just 23 per cent in the polls, seven points behind Reform. Starmer secured the Labour leadership by persuading enough party members that he offered a brand of safe Corbynism. He then crushed the left and secured the premiership by convincing enough of the public that a vote for Labour was the surest way to ensure the Conservative Party did not remain in power. Starmer's aides acknowledge he may have to assemble an entirely different coalition to defeat the populist right, rebuilding the broad popular left he has already defeated. Can the same people who went to war with the left plausibly rebuild it? And what if he is so fundamentally wrong in his analysis of the country and the depth of its problems that he becomes overwhelmed by them? One consequence of Starmer's defeat of the left is a certain loss of energy and youth in the party, a vitality and ideological edge. These are the thoughts playing in my mind as I wait to be called in to see the Prime Minister for the final time on 1 June. I have to be at the Clydeside Distillery in Glasgow at 10.30am. I will have 25 minutes, I'm told. I try to collect my thoughts. When I arrive I am led to a private whisky-tasting room overlooking the Clyde, which has been reserved for us. Amber bottles line the wall. 'Honestly, I like a drink but it's a bit early,' I joke, attempting to lighten the mood, prompting a polite laugh. 'I was trying to think of the last thing we were talking about,' I say. 'We talked about the country not being fundamentally broken… [that] this is not a moment, you know, '79, where everything has to go.' Starmer says he and his family have settled in well at No 10. Photo by Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street 'No, no, no,' Starmer replies. 'And I think it's really important that we are clear about that.' The reason Starmer was in Glasgow that morning was to unveil the latest 'Strategic Defence Review'. Before seeing me he had toured the radio studios declaring that Britain needed to be 'war ready' in case of a Russian attack and declaring Nato the cornerstone of British defence, with the nuclear deterrent more necessary than ever. Once again, Starmer's role is to defend the existing order through retrenchment and steady reform. Aboard HMS Prince of Wales he had told me he wanted to bind Trump's America into European defence by increasing spending. But what if he is wrong about the old order and the possibility it can be fixed, abroad or at home? 'I just don't accept that sort of doomsday scenario or that defeatism,' he replies. Starmer believes that those who say otherwise are wrong, and that he will prove them wrong by making the country work. But if he can't, then it will surely be left to somebody who believes the system needs tearing up. 'Yeah,' he replies, 'but this isn't a theoretical discussion any more. This was a theoretical discussion for many years [but] along came Liz Truss.' Yet many on both the right and the left of British politics believe something is wrong in a much wider sense than Britain's exposure to the bond markets. The right focuses on small boats, crime and immigration, the left on poverty, housing, welfare and inequality. I raise his 'island of strangers' speech, which his critics likened to Enoch Powell. In this speech he warned about Britain's ability to pull together unless more control was asserted over immigration and asylum. Starmer looks sheepish. 'The bit of the speech that I was trying to get across, but maybe didn't as powerfully as I wanted…' he begins, before I interrupt: 'Or too powerfully?' 'Well, no,' he replies. 'Because the… phrase, the… the actual concept was – and I said it in the speech but it didn't come through in the same way, and that's down to me – is I want to lead a nation that can confidently walk forward together as neighbours, as communities, wherever people have come from and whatever their background.' Starmer insists this is a 'progressive approach' but adds: 'I think probably emphasising that bit of it more will get it across better in the future.' Starmer clearly regrets the speech. Here lie the tensions within Starmer and his premiership, though: he believes in the long term, but needs short-term results; he says things in speeches I'm not convinced he entirely believes; he promises change – but offers conservation. His aide then intervenes to wrap up the interview. We're ten minutes into our conversation. I ask whether an island of strangers can go to war. Starmer believes the national spirit remains strong. The country came together after the riots last summer, he says. But it had been rioting in the first place, I reply and raise his 1970s predecessors who shared his vision of stable, sensible England only to be thrown from office amid explosions of disorder. 'No, I won't be shaken from this belief,' Starmer replies, now with conviction. 'I believe we are tolerant, we are reasonable people who will always pull together in a time of crisis and all the evidence points me to that… I've believed that all my life.' Starmer believes the country remains proud but was failed by a collection of charlatans. It will bounce back if the heat is taken out of politics – if there is less politics. Does he worry what his legacy will be, how history will judge him – or does he think more about how his parents would feel? 'I do think about my mum and dad.' But surely he has a sense of how he wants to be remembered? 'That would be for other people to write,' he says. Irrespective of the office, Starmer remains a strikingly normal man. Perhaps he is our first normal Prime Minister, ushering us into our age of normality. I wonder whether this is the distorting perspective of time, the feeling that our prime ministers are becoming ever more normal – or, at least, ever less powerful. In 1997 the British economy was bigger than that of China and India combined. Today, China's economy alone is six times larger. Thatcher was the last prime minister of genuine, world importance. For a brief moment Blair reached tragically towards such status, but proved unable to overcome his own flaws and failures. During the global financial crisis, Brown briefly mattered, though mainly through force of intellect. Cameron continued the trajectory down, a shrunken, vanilla Blair. Those who raged against the dying of this light – Johnson and Truss – only burned out more quickly. Sunak resumed the trend, the first prime minister-management consultant who seemed destined to bounce into something more powerful in Silicon Valley. Starmer is perhaps the inevitable conclusion of this process, the first prime minister comfortable with Britain's new status. He looks and sounds like a Scandinavian leader. There are worse futures. Much of Westminster seems blind to the – still very real – prospect that Labour could remain in power after the next election, alone or in coalition with the other forces on the left. Ultimately, Keir Starmer is convinced he can succeed where every recent prime minister has failed. He is the prime fixer of Britain, the manager, convinced that the country he leads is not so much traumatised as let down. Our innate decency will win out. We will become more content with reduced circumstances, more emotionally controlled, more normal. We will tell ourselves that we mustn't grumble. The hysteria of the past decade will dissipate. Britain will heal. But these are not normal times. On the days I accompanied him, Starmer was inspecting the fleets and troops of a country rearming for war. Reform is rising. The temperature online remains angry, volatile, resentful. Either he will become the country's first normal prime minister, guided by the 'human dignity' he holds as the irreducible core of his politics, and able to make us, if not a great country again, then what in our last meeting he called 'a rich nation in the broadest sense of the term'. Or the Britain we saw last summer will burst out again, and he will be remembered as the last leader of the old normal, the final defender of the shaky post-2008 world before it was dragged into a new state by the figures now jockeying for mastery of the populist right. 'I know what my job is,' Keir Starmer tells me before we part. 'To clear up the mess.' Related [See also: A new era for the New Statesman]
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Could Donald Trump scrap Aukus?
America's policy undersecretary of defence, Elbridge Colby, is one of the brightest brains in Donald Trump's administration. Having served in the first Trump presidency, Colby has an outstanding reputation as a defence and strategic thinker. He is also, however, very much aligned with Trump's America First thinking in respect of foreign policy, and the United States' relationship with her allies. That would be a strategic disaster for Australia and Britain In tasking Colby on Wednesday with reviewing the Aukus nuclear submarine-centred strategic partnership between the US, the UK and Australia, the president sends a clear message to Britain and Australia: Aukus is part of his inheritance from Joe Biden, and its future therefore is far from assured. In a media statement, the Pentagon said: 'The department is reviewing Aukus as part of ensuring that this initiative of the previous administration is aligned with the president's America First agenda. As (Defense) Secretary (Pete) Hegseth has made clear, this means ensuring the highest readiness of our service members, that allies step up fully to do their part for collective defence, and that the defence industrial base is meeting our needs. This review will ensure the initiative meets these common sense, America First criteria.' Colby himself has been ambivalent about Aukus ever since it was established by Biden, and then Australian and British prime ministers, Scott Morrison and Rishi Sunak, in 2021. Addressing a Policy Exchange forum last year, Colby said he was 'quite sceptical' about the Aukus pact, and questioned its viability and ultimate benefits. In a more recent interview with the Australian newspaper, Colby said Aukus's Pillar 1 – the nuclear submarine programme under which Australia would purchase several Virginia-class boats, pending the acquisition of new generation UK-Australian Acute-class submarines – is 'very problematic'. He did say, however, that Pillar 2 – the sharing of military intelligence and technical know-how between the partners – 'is great, no problem'. Colby's long-standing concern is the US's ability to take on China if it ever comes to conflict in the Asia-Pacific, especially over Taiwan. 'How are we supposed to give away nuclear attack submarines in the years of the window of potential conflict with China?' he told the Australian. 'A nuclear attack submarine is the most important asset for a western Pacific fight, for Taiwan, conventionally. But we don't have enough, and we're not going to have enough.' If this is the starting position for Colby's review, its scepticism contradicts the steadfast commitment to Aukus from the current Australian and British Labour governments. Indeed, Britain's latest Strategic Defence Review places high priority on the Aukus partnership as an integral element of British strategic and force planning. Given Colby's previous form on Aukus, the review may well recommend scaling back or discontinuing the nuclear submarine Aukus pillar. But that would be a strategic disaster for Australia and Britain, let alone for Colby's own strategic vision, outlined in his 2021 book, of an 'anti-hegemonic coalition to contain the military ambitions of China', in which he specifically envisioned Australia. Arguably, it doesn't matter which country mans the attack nuclear submarines assigned to the Asia-Pacific theatre, as long as the boats are there. But will Colby see it that way? In Australia, however, the administration's announcement immediately set a cat amongst the pigeons. Currently, Australia spends just over two per cent of GDP on defence, and the Trump administration, including Colby, is pressuring on Australia to do far more. This month, Hegseth, told his Australian counterpart that Australia should be committing at least 3.5 per cent of GDP to ensure not just Aukus, but that her fighting personnel and ageing military hardware are fit for purpose and contributing commensurately to the Western alliance. After his face-to-face meeting with Hegseth, Australian defence minister Richard Marles seemed open to the suggestion. His prime minister, Anthony Albanese, is not. In his first major media appearance since his thumping election win a month ago, Albanese was asked whether the US could renege on supplying nuclear submarines to Australia if spending is deemed inadequate. 'Well, I think Australia should decide on what we spend on Australia's defence. Simple as that', Albanese replied. It hasn't escaped notice here that the Pentagon announced its Aukus review less than 48 hours after Albanese made his declaration, and just days before the Australian prime minister is expected to have his first personal meeting with Trump at the G7 Leaders' Summit in Canada. That meeting, carrying the risk of a public Trump rebuke, surely will be dreaded by Albanese. Dealing with the Americans' insistence on a near-doubling of Australia's defence investment is politically diabolical for Albanese. He has just won re-election on a manifesto promising huge additional social investments, especially in Australia's version of the NHS and a fiscally ravenous National Disability Insurance Scheme. Albanese must keep his left-wing support base onside by expanding already huge public investments and subsidies in pursuing his government's ideological Net Zero and 100 per cent renewable energy goals. All that on top of a burgeoning national debt. To achieve Nato's GDP defence spending target of 3 per cent, let alone Hegseth's 3.5, something has to give. Albanese cannot deliver both massive social spending and vast defence outlays: to keep the Americans happy, and justify the continuation of both Aukus pillars, he will need to either prove himself a Bismarck-calibre statesman, or risk electoral wrath if he retreats on his domestic spending promises, and cuts existing programmes across his government, to afford adequate defence spending headroom. Australia needs America to be a strong ally in our troubled region, but the United States needs steadfast allies like Australia and Britain. Now the administration's scepticism about Aukus's value to the US is officially on the table, with a review entrusted to its biggest Aukus sceptic in Elbridge Colby, Australia and Britain must justify why all aspects of the partnership are a worthwhile investment with them, as America's partners, committed to playing their part in full. How well they do it will be a measure of their political and diplomatic competence.
The Herald Scotland
an hour ago
- The Herald Scotland
The BBC is helping Reform - and has become a danger to democracy
You might not know it - as the national broadcaster, the source of most information for most of Britain has singularly failed to report it - but the BBC has drawn up plans to win over Reform voters. It's strange how the BBC, a channel of staggering narcissism which never misses a chance to talk about itself, isn't saying much about the leaking of minutes from a meeting of its Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee. Read more The story was broken by the Byline Times, one of Britain's 'new media' outlets that's increasingly proving to be an excellent source of investigative journalism. BBC Director-General Tim Davie and other senior figures like 'News CEO' Deborah Turness want to reshape the broadcaster to appeal to Reform voters. They believe BBC news and drama is causing 'low trust issues' among the radical right. Turness discussed altering 'story selection' and 'other types of output, such as drama' to win Reform hearts and minds The committee includes former GB News executive Robbie Gibb, appointed to the BBC board by Boris Johnson. Emily Maitlis once called him an 'active agent of the Conservative Party'. Minutes stated that bosses 'recognised the importance of local BBC teams in the plan, given their closeness to audiences'. So keep an eye on how BBC Scotland behaves from now on. Here's the bottom line: the BBC should not seek to appeal to anyone. It should report the news with complete objectivity, impartiality, and political neutrality. The words 'without fear or favour' should be tattooed on the heart of every BBC employee, especially the cosseted, overpaid establishment mandarins who run the organisation. We pay their wages. The BBC should represent Britain in its entirety, not favoured special interest groups. However, this courting of Reform proves impartiality to be a lie. It doesn't matter if Marxists or Nazis like a particular story. It's irrelevant whether coverage makes liberals happy or conservatives sad, or vice versa. No consideration should ever be paid to whether drama is perceived as progressive or reactionary. What matters is that news is reported accurately and fairly, analysis is balanced, and drama has cultural merit and entertains. By attempting to woo Reform, the BBC alienates everyone else. Worse, the BBC reinforces the grievances levelled against it. Scotland's Yes movement has accused the BBC of bias for years. Now independence supporters can continue to do so but with ammunition to back up their allegations. How can the BBC pretend to report news honestly, or reflect British politics and culture fairly, when it has been caught out cosying up to Nigel Farage? BBC Director-General Tim Davie with former Conservative PM David Cameron (Image: free) The BBC slits its own throat. And many of its enemies will gleefully watch the blood spill. Specifically, Farage. He has consistently attacked the BBC. Indeed, he uses his own platform - the disgracefully biased GB News - to do so. With delicious irony, Farage previously accused the BBC of being a 'political actor'. Well, now the broadcaster appears to be acting politically for its nemesis. Farage threatened to boycott the BBC, and claimed editors used 'story selection' to bash Reform. If Farage ever takes power he'll gut the BBC in an afternoon. In truth, the BBC deserves all it gets. It made Farage's career, endlessly platforming him, giving him far higher exposure than other comparative politicians. If you think there's any fairness to BBC coverage ask yourself how much you see the LibDems on air compared to Reform. Then look at the two parties and their parliamentary representation. Reform has five MPs, the LibDems 72. Indeed, the Greens have four. Do the Greens get four-fifths of the time devoted to Reform? Do they hell. Only last month, Davie, the director-general, was sounding off about the 'crisis of trust' in Britain. He grandly claimed the BBC would play a leading role in reversing the decline and help combat division. The BBC would create a future where 'trusted information strengthens democracy'. Davie, though, is doing everything he can to deepen division, damage democracy and foment distrust in journalism at a time when society needs good, honest reporting more than ever. When he said 'reform' was needed, it now appears Davie meant with a capital R. Currently, Reform is causing chaos in councils the party won at the English local elections. Will that be reported under the new pro-Reform BBC guidelines? I'm afraid we now need to ask ourselves whether the BBC will tip the next election for Reform. Davie should go, along with the entire BBC board. They disgrace journalism, and are not impartial or balanced. Read more The notion of politicising drama is disgusting. Artists exist to create and enrich our lives, not do the bidding of tawdry media executives in hock to the hard-right. In Britain, trust is at rock bottom. New findings released yesterday from the National Centre for Social Research found that just 19% of us believe the current system of governing Britain works. Only 12% trust governments to put country before party. As long as I've been alive, the BBC was billed as the last redoubt for fairness and balance. Over the last decade, that claim has well and truly undergone an acid bath. Now, the mask is off. The BBC has shown us what it really is, and we need to take notice. Globally, the rise of the hard-right has caused many to lose their minds - from commentators and business leaders, to political parties and academics. In Britain, the BBC hasn't just suffered a nervous breakdown, it has completely surrendered its principles of fairness. It's now more a danger to our democracy than a line of defence. Neil Mackay is the Herald's Writer-at-Large. He's a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics
